Audio is Everywhere
Audio is becoming a core part of most products on the internet today.
Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen dating apps launch audio and video messaging features, and real estate apps begin to offer live video tours of properties. There’s been an explosion of audio/video-first collaboration tools for remote companies, such as Zoom and Loom. First-of-their kind audio-first social networks, like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse, have started popping up everywhere. And even as the world opens back up post-pandemic, these features and tools are here to stay.
AI for ASR and NLP
At the same time, we’ve seen rapid developments in the AI that can make sense of all of this audio data. At AssemblyAI, we’re leveraging the same AI technology used to create popular AI models like DALL-E 2, GPT-3, and Google’s (supposedly sentient) LaMDA model, to create State-of-the-Art AI models for transcribing, understanding, and analyzing audio and video data – including Transformers, Large Language Models, massive GPU clusters, and large datasets.
Combined, this is why we’ve seen the number of developers building with our APIs grow 1,000%+ over the past 12 months. We’ve also seen our ARR more than double over the past 6 months alone, and we’re now processing millions of audio/video files with our APIs every single day for hundreds of paying customers – including startups like CallRail, Algolia, Veed, and Fathom, and enterprises like the WSJ, NBC Universal, and Spotify.
Our Series B
Four months ago, we announced our $28M Series A led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator, the Stripe founders – John and Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross.
Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised another $30M in our Series B round, led by global software investor Insight Partners. This brings our total funds raised to just over $65M.
The progress being made in the field of AI is incredibly exciting. Our goal is to expose this progress to every developer and product team on the internet – via a simple set of APIs. As we continue to research and train State-of-the-Art AI models for ASR and NLP tasks (like speech recognition, summarization, language identification, and many other tasks), we will continue to expose these AI models to developers and product teams via simple APIs – available for free.
We hope to be the place that developers and product teams come to for easy access to the advanced AI models they need in order to build exciting new products, services, and entire companies.
Over the past 6 months, we’ve launched ASR support for 15 new languages – including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Hindi, and Japanese, released major improvements to our Auto Chapters and Summarization models, Real-Time ASR models, Content Moderation models, and countless other product updates.
We’ve barely dipped into our Series A funds, but this new funding will give us the ability to aggressively scale up our efforts – without compromising on our runway.
What's Next
With this new funding, we’ll be able to accelerate our product roadmap, build out better AI infrastructure to accelerate our AI research and inference engines, and grow our AI research team – which today include researchers from DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta AI, BMW, and Cisco.
So much of our growth has been product led, and a big focus for us is to launch new models/products at an even faster pace. Through our work, we also hope to be able to, more broadly, push forward the State-of-the-Art in AI – as well as expose AI to more and more developers through our Developer Education team, which have published great introductions to Diffusion Models, Differentiable Programming, and PyTorch.
In these market conditions, we’re very fortunate to be growing, and to have years of runway in the bank. If you’re interested in joining our team, we have over 30 open roles, and we’d love to talk! You can reach out to me personally at dylan@assemblyai.com, or check out our careers page for a list of open roles.
